Arrived yesterday on the island of Vis for a welcome day in port. We’ve been out at anchor for the 7 days now so need to refill the water tanks and visit a supermarket to stock up a few items.

Vis is meant to be one of the nicest Croatian islands so we were looking forward to visiting. We even managed a reasonable amount of sailing to get here – not that it was far. We travelled about 20 miles from last night’s anchorage.

There has been a great big high pressure system over us for the past week, which has meant some pretty fantastic sun and temperatures (sea temperature was 30.5 degrees C  today) but little wind. The huge mountainous hillsides of the Croatian mainland however create a westerly seabreeze which starts to blow around mid-day until around 6 in the evening. For the past few days this has given us a gentle 10 knots in the open but up to 20 knots when funnelled though the large channels between islands. At night it is generally absolutely still, which is a bit close for sleeping but great for nice calm safe anchorages.

Hopefully the system will remain and continue with this pattern, as anything else will just be worse.

We arrived at Vis town quay quite early as we wanted to make sure we would get a place. Quite often if you choose the wrong place to visit on the wrong day you’ll find it packed out with a couple of flotillas taking up all the space. We moored up, washed the boat, filled the tanks and had a mooch about the town. After around 5pm, a Sunsail flotilla of about 20 boats came in and although we shouldn’t comment, it was very amusing watching the sheer unpreparedness of most of the boats coming in to moor. It was amazing to see boats with usually 6 or 8 people on board come in to moor with no lines set up and generally with very little instruction about what each one of them should do. Most of the time the skipper would just reverse up to the quay and there would be a frenzy of lines thrown in the water and at the poor marinaro whilst people fended off other boats by hand before eventually some lines would be secured and things would calm down.

At one point there was an amazing amount of surge in the harbour as a large passenger ferry came in and rotated around. Boats were bashing around all over the place at the waves struck the quay wall and the rocking harmonics amplified and rippled down the quay. We were quite worried for a while, but it passed after a few minutes and we were fine.

For the evening meal we walked over to Kutz around the bay and had a couple of cocktails and went to a recommended fish restaurant where Jacqui had some excellent squid and I had probably the worse approximation of a steak I’d ever tasted. It was like a thin slab of stewed corned beef in both taste and consistency. Not to be recommended by me!